SUNDAY JOINT, 3-16-2025: ANCHORS AWAY IN FLA

Hey All,

The gallery of shipwrecks posted at the bottom of last week's SS Dominator Joint was a fraction, a splinter, of the surfing-adjacent wracks and ruins through history—and of course there will be lots more in years to come as our imminent grid-collapsing Age of Deindustrialization will soon have us building boats to sail the coast for barter and fish and hopefully surf. Shipwrecks won't be as droll when we are among those onboard. 

While we still can, then, let's spend another few moments thinking of wrecks as our guilty pleasure. Or in the amazing and maybe singular case of Amaryllis, a source of actual good waves.

The 440-foot Canadian-built Amaryllis, en route from Manchester, England, to Baton Rouge, to pick up a load of grain, was approaching central Florida on September 6, 1965—just as Hurricane Betsy U-turned a few hundred miles to the east and gave chase. The next night, battered by huge Betsy-generated swells and wind, Amaryllis aimed for safe harbor at Palm Beach Inlet, but the ship's steering was damaged and the boat ran aground at nearby Riviera Beach, directly in front of the still-new Rutledge Motel. Betsy then looped around the tip of Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, hitting Key Largo on the way but saving the really catastrophic strike for Louisiana, at Grand Isle and New Orleans. Amaryllis, meanwhile, was pounded further into the sandbar and finally lodged good and tight about 100 yards off the beach.

Like Dominator, Amaryllis was both Greek-owned and Panama-registered, which struck me as a near-conspiratorial coincidence but, for reasons having to do with politics, geography, and economics, is actually not uncommon. And again like Dominator, the Amaryllis wreck took place just in close proximity to beachfront affluence—"Billionaire's Row" in Palm Beach (home to Mar-a-Lago) is just a few miles down-coast from where the ship landed.

Unlike Dominator, however, Amaryllis became much more than a rubberneck destination (although it was very much that, too), as a sandbar quickly filled in hard against the port side—and, no, it wasn't Mundaka out there, but the best waves in Florida's Gold Coast were indeed soon found just a yardarm or two off Amaryllis' fo'c'sle or possibly the mizzen. Newspaper articles published a few months after Hurricane Betsy report that as many as 100 surfers were counted in the water and on the beach next to Amaryllis. 

The Ship, as it was was called, also became a great hang-out spot. As a local blogger put it years later:

The longer [Amaryllis] sat there, the cooler the beach became. I mean, on one side the beach was being built up and local surfers found the ship to be one of the most spectacular surf spots in the area. But on the other side, [the beach] was being washed away. So much so, in fact, that it uncovered a reef that must have disappeared years before, but now it was a brand-new place for fish, urchins, moray eels, lobsters, barracudas, you name it.

For four or so weeks after the ship went aground, with the entire crew still aboard and hoping Amaryllis would be floated and set back on her way, there were also scenes of international camaraderie. As reported in the St. Petersburg Times in 1966:

After the [hurricane] winds died down, life turned idyllic for the young Greek crewmen. Pretty teenage girls took to hanging around the ship and bilingual flirting became a popular pastime. By night, the Greeks strummed guitars and sang folk songs to the crowds on the beach. The sailors were sent home after about a month, but not until they were stuffed with turkey and all the trimmings dropped from a helicopter.

The Amaryllis captain hand-wrote a note to the American public at large, thanking everybody for being so kind, stuffed the note in a bottle, threw it overboard, and sure enough it was soon discovered by a local nine-year-old boy. That was front-page news. 

On the flip side—there was always going to be a flip side; the Amaryllis beach scene was mostly teen-dominated, and the wreck was therefore used and abused in every imaginable way—surfers took a public relations hit. Before getting on to the next quote, which is possibly slightly damning and 100% funny, I'll just say that beachfront town councils and "concerned citizens" on the Atlantic side of the nation were just as invested in their dislike for teen surfers as their Pacific coast counterparts, and were even quicker to enact all-day surfing bans. My take on this has always been that we were singled out and punished mostly for doing what all teens did, except we had surfboards which offered a convenient way to regulate us. In other words, those "unverified reports of marijuana parties, lovers' trysts, and other non-nautical" activities taking place on Amaryllis were all no doubt true. But since there was no legal avenue to ban teens altogether from hanging out on what was a public beach, the next best thing was to target surfers. 

On the other hand, as podcaster and sage Scott Bass has been saying for years, "surfers are the worst," and I don't doubt that every bit of bad behavior cited below is true, if maybe exaggerated. 

"Youths' Activities Irk Island Residents," Palm Beach Post, July 6, 1966:
Riviera Beach residents asked the City Council for an ordinance which would ban surfers from the area near the grounded freighter Amaryllis. The position of the Amaryllis in the water has created wave conditions favorable to surfing and sometimes hundreds of surfers are in the area. City Manager Robert Carlson said he has received complaints of youngsters screaming on the beach, being at the beach all night huddled around bonfires, using beach chairs belonging to others, washing their surfboards in private swimming pools, using vulgar language, and racing cars on the beach. Those complaining verbally [at a public meeting] did not identify themselves by name. As one woman put it, "We're afraid of them. We tried to tell them in a nice way, but we got a mango thrown through our window. That cost $15 to replace." Police Chief Lennie Cottrell said he assigned two officers in plain clothes to the area once, but a resident ordered them off the property. Mayor Jake Bosma said he had some enforcement ideas that he didn't care to reveal at the time.

But the kids stayed positive. Three months later, at a civic outreach meeting with local high schoolers, one student suggested turning Amaryllis into a nightclub, while another thought it should be converted to a surfing-themed restaurant. 

Not long after that, however, somebody set the boat on fire and it burned through the night.

The end result was as obvious as it was delayed. In 1968, after state, local and federal courts spent a year kicking the disposal-cost issue back and forth among themselves, the Army Corps on Engineers finally stripped the boat completely, removed the tank-contained bunker fuel that had been sloshing around the whole time, towed it three-quarters of a mile offshore and let it drop. Amaryllis today is not the Mundaka of dive spots . . . or is it? This is maybe too Jaws-triggering for me but it looks amazing. Living history. Some of the pot parties and lovers' trysts would have no doubt taken place in the same cargo holds either side of where our happy diver here is floating around.

Thanks for reading, everyone, and see you next week.

Matt

PS: Betsy was the first monster hurricane of the satellite era, and also the first to cause more than $1 billion in damages. Seventy-six people died from Betsy-related causes, mostly in Louisiana. A year after it hit, the Civil Defense Department released a short documentary titled "A Hurricane Called Betsy," and I was glued to the screen for all 27 minutes. There's even a bit of surfing and metal-wheel skateboarding in there, scroll to 6:02.

[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: Hurricane Betsy track as seen in a 1966 government report; surfing the Ship in 1966, photo by ME Gruber; on the beach in front of the Rutledge Motel, 1965; Peter Pulitzer and wife Lilly McKim, Palm Beach, 1955, photo by Slim Aarons; 1965 newspaper headline; Amaryllis, just after it ran aground in 1965. Amaryllis with Rutledge Motel in foreground. Great surfing conditions at the Ship, probably 1967, photo by ME Gruber. Crowded lineup not far from the ship's propeller. Beach scene, 1966, by Gruber. Aerial view of Amaryllis. Small boy looking out at the ship. Amaryllis covered in graffiti, around the time it was set on fire in 1967. "Hello Betsy" image from A Hurricane Called Betsy. Miami hotel getting slammed by Betsy. Two surfers in Biloxi, Mississippi, a few hours before Betsy hit the Louisiana coast.]